RURAL ROUTES/Margot Ford McMillen

Notes of the Season

What with trying to simplify and all, it's been an interesting
holiday season. I was sweating how to tell the family -- read my
lips, no new gifts -- and, from your emails regarding Buy-Nothing
Day, you were worrying about it, too.

"Christmas has been, unfortunately, less than stellar for us,"
went one, "... nothing horrible, but just the overwhelming din of it
... we both really love the city, but it's a bit tough if you're just
living a regular, slim-walletted life. I've been trying to imagine
outside the box this year -- we might splurge and go on a cruise
after the Holiday, so that might sort of pad things ... or run off to
the Catskills for a weekend in a cabin. As you can see, escape is the
operational mode! But we do enjoy shopping for our friends ... just
good books and things that they'll love, cooking for them and they
for us. We get through it with a certain amount of wryness, I'd say.
Again, thanks, and avoid those malls. I think they are Alien breeding
centers."

That's right about the malls. Alyce, a college freshman,
convinced her boyfriend that they could save lots by getting up at 6
a.m. for the sales, but they were disappointed. "It's a ripoff," she
wrote, "Best to learn it while we're young. Never again."

It's impossible to win the corporate's mall game. At the same
time, we want to demonstrate that we love the people we love, and
appreciate the people we appreciate. The conundrum goes like this: As
long as the corporates continue to exploit workers, trash the
environment, steal resources from poor people, and tantalize us into
indebtedness, we don't want to buy from them. But that doesn't mean
we have to ignore the holidays and withdraw from society.

Winter holidays are deep in our culture. We grew up with them,
and we can't give them up completely any more than we can quit
singing "Happy Birthday To You" to our friends. Giving to those we
love is probably genetic -- part of the hunter/gatherer instinct
that moved a primitive mother to bring roots and berries back to her
children rather than hogging them all. We moved from roots and
berries to warm woolen mittens and, today, to video games, but the
instinct is sound.

The desire to simplify has to do with reclaiming our intelligence
about the holidays, not to give them up completely. We can give
things that improve our communities.

I was resolved to extricate myself from the spend-a-thon, and as
I steeled my resolve to write my family a "thanks but no thanks"
letter, there was a note from my little sis: "In lieu of gifts to me
this year, may I ask that you join me in making a contribution to
HOPE Of Rochelle (PO Box 131, Rochelle, IL 61068)? This is a domestic
violence program which does good work. (I know -- I've been a
client.) Their monthly caseload is over a hundred emergency phone
calls, 140-150 shelter nights (that's 4-5 women/children every night
of the month), and 10-12 orders of protection."

And that note, in the email way, was joined by notes from my mom,
my daughters, each naming a charity they cared about. I asked for
donations to our community radio station, because without independent
media, we're lost.

So here's a prediction. If you tried to get off the holiday
sleigh this year, I bet it was easier than you thought. And if you
didn't, well, there's always next year!

Now to the farm bill news alert. As we know, family farms --
those grossing between $10,000 and $249,999 -- are under siege.
Larger agricultural operations -- about 7.2% of ag operations in
the nation -- sell a whopping 72.1% of the products. Increasingly,
therefore, food at the supermarket comes from factory farms rather
than family farms. And that means that, increasingly, grocery-store
meat comes from confined animal feeding operations -- or CAFOs.
And, those factory farms are the mega-polluters in the ag sector,
dumping manure into streams and creeks, and noxious gases into the
air

Adding insult to environmental injury, family farmers have lost
markets to these mega-polluters and, worse, find themselves actually
paying to build the industrial behemoths through export incentives,
federally-guaranteed loan programs and other tax-financed industrial
bonuses. (To learn about the big winners in your county, look at the
website EWG.org, and click on your county name.) These tax-financed
programs are supposed to help build the industry but family farmers
are locked out. The giants raise their own meat, thank you very much,
and don't need farmers.

Now a program that once helped family farmers has been altered by
Congress so that more tax money can go into CAFO coffers. The
Environmental Quality Incentives Program -- EQIP -- was
introduced in the 1996 Farm Bill to provide farmers with incentive
and cost-sharing funds to protect the environment. Farmers could
apply for money to terrace fields, which prevents run-off, or fence
creeks off from grazing livestock.

The cap of $50,000 per farmer in the 1996 Farm Bill ensured that
the money went to family farmers, and helped re-build local food
systems. To provide further guarantee, it was written into the 1996
Bill that EQIP funds could not be used by CAFOs. But, in the fight
over the 2002 farm bill, the lobbyists for industrial agriculture won
a big battle -- CAFOs can now get $450,000 of public money over
seven years. That's your tax money and mine.

EQIP is administrated by the Natural Resources Conservation
Service (NRCS), a USDA agency. While many of the guidelines for EQIP
are clearly mandated by the Farm Bill or left to administrators in
D.C., there is considerable room for flexibility at the state level.

We need to tell NRCS that this is not the time to provide
incentives for new or expanding CAFOs. Livestock production through
CAFOs is not sustainable, whether in the short or long term. Family
farm livestock production, on the other hand, has the potential to
provide a sustainable economic and environmental future.

There is a national goal of placing 60% of EQIP funds in the
hands of livestock producers. Tell your NRCS office that EQIP funds
should be prioritized to independent family farm operations, and that
new or expanding CAFO's should not receive EQIP funding.

Minnesota has adopted this policy already. Tell your farm leaders
that the money needs to go to sustainable farm operations, not the
big pigs.

Margot Ford McMillen farms and teaches English at a college in
Fulton, Mo. Email: mcmillm@jaynet.wcmo.edu.